Hello, my name is Edda Gschwendtner, I'm accelerator physicist and I'm leading the project, AWAKE, here at CERN. AWAKE means Advanced Wakefield Experiment and it's an R&D experiment where we develop a new technology to accelerate
particles. The AWAKE experiment started in 2016 and the first two years then until 2018 was
really the proof of concept. So plasma wakefield acceleration means that we will use one beam
to accelerate another beam. So what we managed to show is that indeed we can use the proton beam
from the SPS to drive the wakefields in a 10-metre- long plasma source and we managed to accelerate
electrons already to very high energy there, so we were very happy about that. Now we are moving
on to the next phase in the experiment where we want to demonstrate that we can accelerate
electrons to high energies and controlling the beam quality. This is very important because this
is what we need then really for a real particle physics experiment. So how does in principle work, the plasma wakefield acceleration? So you have to imagine you have a lake which is the plasma, and
you have a beam which in the lake here is the boat. So this beam is the proton beam from the
CERN SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) and this proton beam goes through the lake through plasma, and produces wakefields in the
back there and then we have another beam which are the surfers and these are the electrons that jump
on these waves and they are getting accelerated. So now we are starting this new phase and for this we built a new plasma source which
is again 10 metre long and this plasma source now has a density step, what does it mean? We simply
have two areas with two different densities and this allows us to accelerate particles much
much stronger along these 10 metres. As we had to remove our old plasma source and now installing
the new one, we had a unique opportunity to use the proton beam to test prototype of a different
plasma source and these different plasma source is based on a different technology and could be
a potential candidate then for scalable plasma sources, so having then instead of 10 metre long
even hundreds of meter long which makes it very interesting really then for particle physics
experiments because then along this 100 metres we can accelerate particles to hundreds of GeVs (giga electronvolts) of energy to use these electrons then for experiments.
